The stately Louisville house called Ashbourne stands beside the Ohio River on a lush 89-acre property, where it started out as a farmhouse in 1808 and in time earned a rightful position on the National Register of Historic Places. The Kentucky estate has been in Augusta Holland’s family since her great-grandparents bought it in the 1920s. As children, Augusta and her brother and sister—like their father and his siblings before them—were encouraged to take full run of the place, which boasted a swimming hole in a defunct quarry, a donkey cart for riding around the acreage, and once-formal gardens that were steadily running wild themselves. Today Augusta’s own three children revel in the same freedom, darting in and out of the house’s always-open doors.

When her grandmother died in 2011, Augusta was living with her North Carolina–born husband, Gill, and their kids in a wonderful old Louisville home they’d found upon moving back south after a stretch in New York City. But faced with the chance to buy Ashbourne from the estate, Augusta felt her deep ties to the property and found herself thinking, This is it—I’m not going anywhere. Still, she knew that sensitive changes would be required to make it suit her modern family. “I wanted to keep the connection to my father and grandparents while making the place not only our own but also one for future generations. The question was, How do I give it that big dose of love?”

Friendship was part of the answer, challenging the old saw that working with friends rarely succeeds. The Hollands’ interior decorator, Todd Klein, also grew up in Louisville—he was in Augusta’s older brother’s class at school—and savored memories of Ashbourne’s big parties. Years later, while studying for a graduate degree in urban planning at Columbia University, Augusta saw Klein’s work in a magazine and asked him to help with her Greenwich Village apartment. Reunited, they grew close. Three more collaborations with the family over the years guaranteed the designer a role in coaxing Ashbourne into the 21st century.
Another family friend, landscape architect J. P. Shadley of Lexington, Massachusetts, had already signed on to sort out the grounds, so the only missing link was the right architect. Klein realized he might have met just the one in Joel Barkley, a Tennessee native and principal at the firm Ike Kligerman Barkley in New York, with whom he had attended a recent design conference in Copenhagen. The first time Barkley visited the Hollands, his sensitivity to Ashbourne’s history and potential moved the couple. As Augusta puts it, “Joel made us an instant team.”

Augusta and Gill Holland turned to architect Joel Barkley and designer Todd Klein to update Ashbourne, the historic Louisville, Kentucky, estate that’s been in her family for generations. Throughout the home, classic architecture is juxtaposed with modern furnishings; in the family room, a 1930s French armchair shares the spotlight with a Gabi Trinkaus collage hanging above a ’50s English brass chest.

High among the owners’ priorities was making the home sustainable, which the crew accomplished by installing a geothermal heating and cooling system and solar panels. “We’d been in this territory before,” Augusta says: In 2008 she and Gill converted a 115-year-old former dry-goods store in downtown Louisville into the Platinum LEED–certified Green Building, which now houses Gill’s film- and music-production companies, as well as an art gallery and offices for other tenants.

Barkley’s vision for reviving the residence focused on centering family life in the building’s 19th-century core, which meant rediscovering the original farmhouse amid a jumble of later additions. (The architect’s skill in paring them away prompted Klein to suggest he add “surgeon” to his résumé.) But before restoration could begin, the structure had to be lifted two feet above the floodplain. “That was difficult,” Barkley recalls, the understatement soft but clear.

The decorating was undertaken in a similar spirit of renewal and reinvention. “Because we’d worked together on previous houses, we wanted to recycle, both for economy and because we still loved the things we’d chosen the first time around,” Klein says. “The library,” notes Augusta, as an example, “is the third home for those curtains.” Even after other family members had claimed favorite things from Ashbourne’s trove, plenty remained—including the dining room furniture, and much of the living room’s. “For the whole house,” says Klein, “I think all we bought were three beds and some rugs.” He refreshed older pieces as needed with custom fabrics that indulged the couple’s—and his own—love of color.

Augusta proposed a monochromatic living room—in blue—“that would rely on texture and subtle variation of color to make it calm and peaceful and also really inviting,” she says. An aqua wall covering launched a round-robin of fabric-choosing as she and Klein tested just how many blues could play well together. Now it’s the “one room visitors can’t stop talking about,” says the decorator, who swears that the space captures the color of Augusta’s eyes.

Other delights abound: precisely incorporated salvaged Kentucky cabinetry, furniture made from holly trees felled in the rerouting of the driveway, a vibrant pink sofa. Ceilings coated with glossy white lacquer, a bit of decorating legerdemain Klein learned from his late mentor Albert Hadley, make magic as they reflect the tall windows in Ashbourne’s living and dining rooms. And the Hollands’ art collection joins in the overall enchantment. Coincidentally or not, a stunning Gabi Trinkaus collage that hangs above a vintage English brass chest in the family room is called Live with Bold—a very good motto for Ashbourne itself.

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